Words Without Vowels

More than a hundred WyldTyle words contain no A, E, I, O, or U. Most lean on Y doing a vowel's job, a handful are interjections like HMM and SHH, and a few, like CRWTH and CWM, are Welsh imports that look like typos. They are the answer to the opposite problem from the vowel flood: a board where every roll came up consonant.

The list, by length

Y counts as a consonant in WyldTyle, because it sits on the consonant die alongside T, N, and the rest. That means every word below can be spelled from consonant rolls alone.

The small number after each word is its WyldTyle score with no wild tiles. Letter values are on the scoring guide.

Y is the key letter

Look through the list and nearly every word has a Y in it. BY, MY, CRY, DRY, FLY, GYM, SHY, SKY, TRY, WHY, MYTH, HYMN, LYNCH, NYMPH, RHYTHM. Y is a four-point letter that the dice roll about one time in thirty consonant calls, so it is not common, but when it appears it is unusually powerful. It can fill the vowel position in a word without using up one of your actual vowels, and it scores four points doing so.

The practical upshot: when a Y arrives and a word on your board is short of vowels, consider whether the Y can stand in. SPRY, TRYST, and GLYPH are all reachable from a consonant-heavy hand.

The true vowel-free words

A smaller set has no Y either. HM, MM, SH, BRR, HMM, NTH, PHT, PSST, SHH, TSK, PFFT, and TSKTSK are interjections or abbreviations that dictionaries accept as words. CWM (a mountain hollow) and CRWTH (a Welsh stringed instrument) treat W as a vowel, in the Welsh manner. None of these will win you many points, but MM in the two-letter slot or NTH in the three-letter slot has rescued many a Wyld Pyle bonus.

When a consonant-heavy board happens

It should be rare. A board of eight typical words needs about fourteen vowels out of thirty-eight letters, and the default consonant-and-vowel roll supplies nineteen. To end up short of vowels, you have to have called two consonants too many times, or had a wretched run of luck on the vowel die.

If it happens anyway, the two-vowel roll exists for exactly this reason: it delivers two vowels in a single turn and no consonants. Call it until the open slots have what they need. And in the meantime, remember that BY, MY, and SHY are all sitting there waiting for a stray Y.